The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

Upstairs and far away in the control room the recorders, activated by their voices, continued to whirl.  So very much elsewhere in the establishment do the walls have ears that neither Mildred nor Walburga are now conscious of them as they were when the mechanisms were first installed.  It is like being told, and all the time knowing, that the Eyes of God are upon us; it means everything and therefore nothing.

The abbey in the English town of Crewe has become the epicenter of a national scandal.  It seems that to help ensure her election for abbess (is that a thing?) a nun named Alexandra has been bugging the entire abbey to listen in on her rivals.  One particular bugging operation--the installation of a microphone in her opponent Felicity's sewing box--was badly bungled, and suspected by Felicity when she discovered that her silver thimble was missing.  Fast forward a few months: Alexandra is abbess, but Felicity has disappeared with her lover, a Jesuit priest, and all of England is consumed with the salacious story of the silver thimble and the bugged Abbey.

The Abbess of Crewe makes its inspirations plain: the subtitle on the cover is "A wicked satire on Watergate."  Alexandra is the Nixon figure, a megalomaniac and paranoiac who, although almost assured to win the position, must subvert the rules of power and transform the entire abbey under the power of her will.  Abbess is weakest, I think, when it cleaves to closely to the Watergate model and the conception of Alexandra as Nixon, and best when Alexandra, as a character, breaks out of the narrowness of that restriction.  When faced with public scandal, Alexandra barrels ahead happily; she's convinced that she and the abbey have entered a life that is mythological rather than historical:

The Abbess continues evenly, 'The more scandal there is from this point on the better.  We are truly moving in a mythological context.  We are the actors; the press and the public are the chorus.  Every columnist has his own version of the same old story, as it were Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, only of course, let me tell you, of a far inferior dramatic style.  I read classics for a year at Lady Margaret Hall before switching to Eng. Lit.  However that may be--Walburga, Mildred, my Sisters--the facts of the matter are with us no longer, but we have returned to God who gave them.  We can't be excommunicated without the facts.  As for the legal aspect, no judge in the kingdom would admit the case, let Felicity tell it like it was as she may.  You cannot bring a charge against Agamemnon or subpoena Clytemnestra, can you?' 

Walburga stares at the Abbess, as if at a new person.  'You can,' she says, 'if you are an actor in the drama yourself.'

While the other nuns are singing along with the hymns in the book, Alexandra chants to herself passages of British poetry.  For her, the bugging isn't even really an expression of the will to power, but a kind of art piece.  Good art, she says, needs "not be plausible, only hypnotic," and she's more than willing to provide the spectacle that the public craves because it puts her beyond the realm of history and politics.  Applied to Watergate, it seems like Spark is less interested in the petty reality of a politician trying to consolidate power than the idea that great actors on the world stage are involved in a kind of mythopoesis, the making of a legend or story.  I doubt Nixon thought of it that way, but Alexandra embraces it.  (Frighteningly, I think our current president does think that way: political reality is subservient to a mythic story at which he's at the center.  Alexandra is really more Trumpian than she is Nixonian.)

The Abbess of Crewe is one of those Spark books that you admire and enjoy, but you wish were just a little longer and more substantial.  Its moments of comedy are as charming as ever--the Jesuit priest dressing up as a woman to meet Sister Walburga in the Harrod's dressing room to recover the illicit tapes, the globetrotting missionary Sister Gertrude who calls in on the "green phone" to act as a kind of guiding conscious--but they seem... parsimonious?  Alexandra wants an epic, something on the scale of the Odyssey or the Iliad, but Spark has the last laugh--she only gets these slim pages.